Funding and institutional details on this page were reviewed in August 2026. Amounts and program descriptions are dated so historical initiatives are not presented as permanently current.
Leading Consciousness Researchers
David Chalmers — NYU, Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
Coined "the hard problem" in a landmark 1995 paper and co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the field's main academic society. His work also connects the original problem to the modern question of whether AI can be conscious.
Giulio Tononi — University of Wisconsin–Madison
Originated Integrated Information Theory and remains its lead defender, through both the 2023 controversy over whether IIT counts as legitimate science and the 2025 Nature study that partially supported its predictions.
Christof Koch — Allen Institute for Brain Science
Longtime IIT collaborator and its most visible public defender, and one of the hosts of the Templeton-funded structured adversarial collaboration that tested IIT against Global Workspace Theory.
Stanislas Dehaene — Collège de France
Built Bernard Baars' original global workspace idea into a testable neuroscience research program, and led the Global Workspace Theory side of the 2025 head-to-head test.
Anil Seth — University of Sussex
The leading voice for predictive processing accounts of selfhood and perception, and a prominent public defender of keeping Integrated Information Theory inside the boundaries of legitimate science even amid the 2023 pseudoscience controversy.
Hakwan Lau — Higher-order theory research program
Leads the modern higher-order state space theory, tying conscious perception to prefrontal reality-monitoring circuits, and was among the 124 signatories of the 2023 IIT letter.
Liad Mudrik and Lucia Melloni — Cogitate Consortium leadership
Ran the theory-neutral experimental side of the 2025 Nature adversarial collaboration, a major attempt to create a shared empirical test between competing camps.
Consciousness Research Labs and Institutions
- Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness — the main professional home for researchers across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology working on consciousness.
- Allen Institute for Brain Science — a major independent research institute pouring resources into how brain circuits produce subjectivity and self-awareness.
- Carboncopies Foundation — a nonprofit advocacy and coordination organization focused on whole brain emulation and mind uploading.
Who Funds Consciousness Research?
Templeton World Charity Foundation - $30 million total initiative
The foundation describes Accelerating Research on Consciousness as a $30 million initiative supporting structured adversarial collaborations. These projects require rival theory camps to jointly preregister competing predictions and test them together, the model that produced the 2025 Nature study covered in the comparison of leading theories of consciousness.
Center for Open Science and Templeton - $1.125 million program
The linked announcement describes a $1.125 million competitive grant program for consciousness researchers using preregistration and the Registered Reports process. This was a specific program amount, not an annual field-wide funding total.
NIH BRAIN Initiative - program-specific opportunities
The NIH BRAIN Initiative is a major United States neurotechnology funding vehicle rather than a dedicated consciousness fund. At the August 2026 review, its listed opportunities covered areas such as neural recording technology, brain-data infrastructure, and neuroethics. Award sizes and annual totals varied by funding announcement and should be read from the linked official opportunity pages.
FDA Breakthrough Devices Program - regulatory, not funding
This program does not finance research. It provides qualifying medical devices with more frequent FDA interaction and prioritized review. At the August 2026 review, it represented an important pathway for emerging brain-computer interfaces, but designation did not mean that a device had received full marketing approval.
EU Human Brain Project → EBRAINS
The Human Brain Project was a historical EU flagship that ran from 2013 to 2023 with more than €600 million in funding. It did not deliver a full human brain simulation, but it left behind EBRAINS, a research infrastructure that was operating at the August 2026 review.
How Consciousness Research Is Funded and Tested
The August 2026 funding picture showed a clear pattern: the deepest question, why anything feels like anything, received little dedicated government funding and relied heavily on philanthropic programs. Applied work on devices that read or influence brain activity had larger public funding routes and formal regulation. This reflected the kinds of outcomes funders and regulators could test: clinical protocols and safety standards can be written for a brain implant, while no generally accepted protocol can directly determine whether a system has subjective experience.